thebigp

April 5, 2024—printed off 4/10/24
Victor Davis Hanson
The second incident was last week. I heard a bullet whiz through the almond orchard’s lower limbs. It sounded like it traveled 3 feet off the ground, about 20 yards from me. I could see that it came from a parked car about ¼ mile away. Two men from a dry pond bottom had been shooting an AR-15-like semi-automatic weapon toward our place. They apparently overshot the bank/backstop in between us, where they had placed target bottles. Accidents will happen.
The third “encounter” was the most eerie and uncouth. Last night, a small compact hatchback was parked alongside the orchard at dusk. As I walked parallel to it, I noticed two things: no one was in it—or anywhere near it among the growing shadows of the orchards.
And second, the hatchback door at the rear was strangely popped wide open. At first, I thought the car was stolen, abandoned, and stripped? Or was the owner nearby trying to steal copper wire from the pump a few yards away? Or was the car broken down and they were attempting to get help somewhere?
So, I walked alongside the compact. Suddenly as I neared, I heard strange noises from what I thought was an empty hatchback and then turned startled.
Laying in the rear section of the car were what looked like two women, one was flat on her back with her legs around the other’s neck, the former with her head down.
Stunned, crede mihi, at first I didn’t know whether they were engaged in some sort of mixed martial arts fight, or one was having a heart attack and receiving CPR, or someone had died. I stopped cold and was about to ask what was going on.
And then in a nanosecond, as I passed the car, the picture became all too clear.
Wanting to flee the scene of such a private interaction, but furious that they simply had trespassed and parked in the orchard, I started yelling out in broken Spanish, ¡Esto es propiedad privada!
I kept on walking, turning back at 20 yards, as they seemed by then to be dressed. As I entered the fourth row of the orchard, they sped off, screaming something out the window.
Is it California etiquette now that the property owner has to apologize for inadvertently interrupting trespassers?
This week—freezer, bullet, wh**ever—prompted me to recall the top ten encounters of the last few years, all emblematic of the decline of rural California.
At the end of the litany, I’ll offer some ideas about what went wrong with us. 1) Are open borders the culprit, even six hours by car north of San Diego? 2) Was it the radical t***sformation of farming from family to latifundia agriculture? 3) Was it the national trend to see private property as communal—in the spirit of squatterism? or 4) Is there really no law anymore, as bogus claims of social justice trump jurisprudence?